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A Stolen Shipment Of Uncharted 4 Copies Surface In The UK, Police Involved
You may have seen reports that copies of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End have been surfacing in the UK. The immediate thought is that one or more retailers broke the street date and gave some happy gamers a head start. That’s not exactly what happened.
In a post on the PlayStation Blog, president of worldwide studios Shuhei Yoshida explains that the copies circulating were stolen in transit. The police are now involved in the matter.
Yoshida says that Sony will work to protect users from spoilers as best it can. “As with most Naughty Dog games, the unfolding story is such an integral part of the experience and for this reason we wanted to warn you to beware of the potential for spoilers to be posted by people with access to stolen copies of the game,” he writes. “An extremely talented team has worked long and hard to bring Nathan Drake’s greatest adventure to life and we would urge you to help us prevent this from being spoiled by purchasing copies of the game ahead of the launch date. Please rest assured we will be very vigilant to protect you from this as far as we can so you can enjoy Uncharted 4’s experience to its fullest on May 10.”
While Yoshida doesn’t go into specifics, we can expect that Sony will be aggressively monitoring Twitch and YouTube to shut down any footage. Unfortunately, text is harder to monitor, so social media and forums are likely to carry some amount of danger for the next couple of weeks.
[Source: PlayStation Blog]
Our Take
This isn’t the first time the video game industry has been targeted for physical theft (though it is certainly less common than digital pilfering). In 2011, a French shipment of 6,000 Modern Warfare 3 copies were stolen. Last year, a truck full of Splatoon Amiibos were lifted in the UK.
We get it. You want to play these anticipated games (and sell them second hand). But when you target a game subtitled “A Thief’s End,” you may just be setting yourself up to get caught.
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